There are two methods of making records unavailable in the system: One is to delete the record, the other is to de-activate the record. A de-activated record is not available for selection, but available for reporting. There are two reasons for de-activating and not deleting records:

(1) The system requires the record for auditing purposes.
(2) The record is referenced by other records. E.g., you cannot delete a Business Partner, if there are existing invoices for it. By de-activating the Business Partner you prevent it from being used in future transactions.

The role from which a permission has been inherited. If a permission has this field set it means that this is an inherited permission, an therefore that the role owner of the permission is able to access it because it inherits from the role defined in this field.